The present invention relates to a system and method for identifying companies with specific business objectives.
Sales-oriented companies need to continue to find new customers for their products and services. Market segmentation is often used in marketing studies to characterize potential clients in terms of their overall buying or spending characteristics. For companies that sell into the consumer market, clients are individuals who purchase goods and services from these sellers. For companies that sell to other companies, market segmentation involves analyzing a broad set of companies as potential clients for their offerings. Such market segmentation studies typically use so-called firmographic data that includes the company's address, industry classification, available financial metrics, and other structured data.
Currently, there are number of data vendors that provide structured, firmographic information on companies. For example, Standard and Poor's provides detailed financial information obtained from SEC filings for all publicly traded companies. Dun and Bradstreet provides addresses and estimates of annual revenue, number of employees, etc., for a much larger set of public and private companies, including very small companies. These sources of firmographic information, however, provide no insight into the products and services offered by a company. Information about products and services offered by a company is often displayed on the company's website, and can be located via Internet search engines.
Known search methods, however, do not present a unified view of the combined structured data, and the unstructured web content identified by a search. The following specific example highlights the shortcomings of known search methods when a unified searching view is desired. The example assumes that a search is required to identify companies in New York State, which have annual sales between $100M and $500M, and which provide consulting in Sarbanes Oxley compliance. Entering “Sarbanes Oxley consulting” into a known search engine will return a list of relevant sites, some of which may be links to companies that actually offer this type of service. The conventional search techniques, however, fail to identify those companies that offer this service AND meet the location AND meet the revenue requirements, as stated.
Similarly, querying a database containing firmographic data will allow one to easily locate companies that meet the firmographic requirements, but will not return a subset of companies that actually offer the consulting service.